In the latest issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement (subscription only), Professor Alison Wolf asks whether she's wasting her students' time in setting them reading from the work of Marx, since they're not "connecting" with him. A couple of things Wolf says in framing the issue strike me as odd. For example:

My generation, like that of my parents, was defined by where we stood on this. Did we loathe Communism with a passion, or were we instinctively on the Soviet Union's side because it was inspired by Marxism and anti-capitalist?

To me this misdescribes the way things were at the time I take Alison Wolf to be referring to. There were in that generation many who were inspired by Marxism but who were also perfectly aware of the crimes and the horrors of Stalinism and did not uphold the Soviet Union as a commendable model of what a post-capitalist society should be. Another, though more trivial, thing - Wolf writes:

In my twenties, I taught in an East Coast city in the US. I remember a clean-cut and diligent student coming up to me after class. "Now can I just make sure I've got this correct?" she asked. "The proletariat - that's the middle classes, right?" For years I've used this incident to show that the US really is a different country.

I don't think the incident shows that, or anything much at all. I've taught Marxism over the years to hundreds and hundreds of students; on this as on any other subject, in teaching you sometimes encounter bizarre misunderstandings.

But these are merely preliminaries to what I want to engage with here - which is Wolf's conclusion that her students are right to be bored with Marx, and she won't be troubling them further with him. True, the context of this conclusion is rather specific: 'drawing up reading lists and course notes for a new masters degree in public-sector management.' In that context, she says:

I am not sure that he offers any insights into the workings of state bureaucracies. He said very little about them directly because he thought the state was going to wither away.

But Wolf's conclusion is quite general:

If abandoning the study of Marxism means we repeat history the "second time as farce" - well, there are worse things than farce in this world.

OK, so here are 10 reasons why, whatever may be the case in teaching public-sector management, students and other people should still be reading Marx:

1. Although in its detail Marx's theory of capitalist exploitation is fatally flawed, he presented a powerful account - perhaps the most powerful there has been - of how class societies are, integrally, based upon the exploitation of some people by others, as well as reasons for thinking that this is an unjust state of affairs.

2. Marx famously argued that the point is to change it - the world, that is, and for the better. It's not the only point, but it remains an enduringly important and urgent one.

3. In the concept of alienated labour, he conveyed vividly the oppressiveness of a life exhausted by work that is altogether 'external' to the worker, leaving no space for realizing his or her autonomous purposes.

4. Marx was a great writer - as the American critic Edmund Wilson described him, the 'poet of commodities'. For everything else it is or isn't, the first volume of Capital is a fine work of literature.

5. With the idea of commodity fetishism Marx explained some of the ways in which historical structures and practices come to be seen by people, falsely, as just part of the natural order of things.

6. His approach to studying history in terms of class and the constraints and influences of the economic infrastructure of society has provided historians and others with indispensable tools of social and historical analysis.

7. For all that he was its most famous critic, Marx wrote - in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere - as compellingly as anyone on the historically revolutionary and progressive features of capitalism.

8. He also wrote with a commitment to humanist and Kantian-type ends - to the vision of autonomy, equally, for all - that was transparent and sustained.

9. From Marx's work you can learn how a theory and vision that are liberatory in intent must be gravely deficient if they lack - as his did lack - an adequate account of political and legal norms and institutions.

10. From his work students and others can ascertain for themselves why people who say it isn't worth reading any longer are mistaken.